Towels and Treasure Maps

Sometimes I can be a little thick in the head. It turns out that this year, Quest focuses on a different theme each week. Week one was Get Clear with Yourself. At the end of the week we were invited to take a look at our answers and see if a pattern might be emerging.

Portal of Possibility

And so I took Jeffrey Davis’ advice and sketched out my favorite piece of geometry–a Venn Diagram–and distilled my answers to a set of words that could fit in each circle to see where they might overlap. And I found three words in common:

Experiment

Art (which includes all creative endeavors, including writing, of course)

People

But it also left out two other very important items that have arisen repeatedly lately:

Travel

Home (which also includes health because body, building, planet… they are all essentially the same thing)

So even though the great and mighty Venn seems to have failed me here, I’m going to just go ahead and add them to the mix.

Apparently my future self is pretty outspoken because in addition to the five pages of writing which I have distilled down to the bullet list below:

Sometimes it’s not the thing that seems like the perfect fit, but the thing you’ve been running from, that gives you what you need

Do not let this life/world tame you, the color of the wheat fields may be beautiful but there is a sadness in them that you don’t need to carry around anymore–put it down

Dare to under-schedule–make space in your day and in your rooms

Keep your house clean and your body well rested

Get out of your head, out of your house, and into the bigger world

Make big messes–ones that need at least three beach towels to clean up

Do one small thing every day to move you closer to your dream–you don’t have to wait until you own property to start building your dream home

Make something just for yourself, and go big–really BIG; fill the whole wall if you can, try to fit in everything you love, everything you want to learn, but leave out anything that might hold you back–this is not a memorial, it’s a treasure map to your freedom

And for God’s sake, stop referring to yourself as a girl–you’re a woman, own it

She also told me that when it comes to wild dreams, mine aren’t nearly wild enough. She may be right. #futureself #3towelyear #treasuremap #iamwoman #wild #synthesis

And on that note, here are some wonderful other responses to the prompt.